AEDM November 15th

I know y'all believe me; still, I like having pictures. I'm very visual, and if I can't see it I forget it exists (which is one reason I tend to live out of laundry baskets, because if I put my clothes away in the drawers that means OMG I have no clothes!)

So I got another two rows done on my Hallowe'en/Samhain/November yellow-orange-and-black quilt, bringing it up to seven of the fifteen rows of twelve, nearly half (as far as the nine patches are concerned). It's starting to take over my floor, hmmm. Given the layout of my studio room (which is an attic room), my project wall (a hunk of batting hung up that you can pin pieces to, then step back from, so you can get a look at it, and rearrange) is actually my floor and the rug, since with the tilty ceiling, built-in bookcases, doors, chairrails, the futon, &c there is no blank piece of real estate on the wall. Except this quilt is probably going to end up about the size of the entire rug. Hmmmm.

I rearranged it by color, so it would be easier to keep track of how I'd already combined the colors. I'm shooting for no repeats. Looks pretty good so far!

AEDM November 14th

And again with no pictures of what I did. Oh well. I cut out more (and more, and more) of the squares for my orange-yellow-black-and-grey quilt; I've finally gotten enough now to start up sewing together another batch. I've got sixty nine-patches done already, and I think the finished size is going to be twelve by fifteen squares, so I'll need one hundred eighty altogether. So that's one third down, with one hundred twenty to go. I still need to find probably about four yards of ash grey cotton for the plain squares in between.

I also sat down and listed a bunch of unfinished object projects, and then laid out the next series of steps to do for each, which is very helpful. Because I'd like to use November also to help me learn to finish things (I am notorious for the amount of UFOs I've got kicking around. How many quilts have I started now?)

Earlier today (well the 13th, I guess) I went scouting around for lumber on the property. I may have found a good hunk of something to use as the two inch thick piece for the top of the bookcase I designed last week. Except, looking at it, all I could think of was Gandalf's remark about Barliman Butterbur's mind: it was 'like a lumber room: things wanted, always buried.'

Hmmm.

AEDM November 13th

I did a couple little watercolors (and when I say little, I mean like one and a half by not quite three inches) to scan in for little Etruscan Sim wallpapers. Again, though, I don't have a scanner just now (the sibling was supposed to bring it over for me to borrow it today, but forgot), so I don't have anything to show.

I'm making stuff, honest!

AEDM November 11th & 12th

Yesterday I did some journal-type writing; I guess that counts as art, but again, I've got nothing to show (or nothing that I'm willing to show, anyway). Today I played around with little texture maps for Sims stuff (it's a hobby), in the hopes of making a little Etruscan woman (my goal is to make an entirely old Pagan Sim-world). It looks a little odd, since it's a texture map, and stretches to fit around the 3D mesh, which in this case, has two braids in the front, and several more hanging down the back. I had thought that given the shape it would work well with an Etruscan-style hat; but when I tested it in the game it turned out that whoever did the texture mapping had gotten the color for the braids from the top of the head, so they were showing up the same color as the hat. So I think that I'll have to ditch the hat, alas.

AEDM November 10th

Well it's another day where I don't have a whole lot to show. I decided that even if I didn't know what I was going to do with the grey parts of that Hallowe'enish quilt I started, that didn't mean I had to stop working on the orange and black nine patches. So I cut out a bunch of black squares. I didn't get as far as cutting more of the yellow and orange ones though, so I don't have anything to assemble together yet (since I used up all the ones I'd already cut).

I'm counting it, even though part of me things that's really pathetic. But then I have this habit of discounting what I do. The year before last (I think?) I also participated in the year-long (and rather more laid-back) version of Creative Every Day, also hosted by Leah. Part of that was keeping a creativity journal. I was really surprised to find what I counted and didn't count as being creative.

Because when I wrote down every little creative thing I did in a day, I had this huge list. Every day. Things like blog posts, cooking stew, sewing, knitting, twiddling about on the guitar, things I discounted as not Art, capital A.

And I'm realizing that not counting prep work, which is what cutting out fabric for a quilt is, is a way of disappearing the energy put into it, which is not good for the soul. Because you end up at the end of the day tired and thinking you did nothing. Which is not true at all.

So. It counts.

AEDM November 9th

Well it was another one of those days (well, okay, I'm talking about Monday the 8th here, properly) where the sibling and I spent several hours cleaning up junk and sorting stuff to go to the scrapyard. However, I did manage to squeeze a little bit of art in there.

Namely a little bit of dyeing. Last month I did a batch of yarn in black walnut; today I strained out some pokeberry dye, tied some of the black walnut yarn off tie-dye fashion, and plunked it into the pokeberry solution. This is real low-tech dyeing, I suppose I should mention; I'm just going to let it sit there for I don't know a week or two maybe and see what I get.

The black walnut dye, made from crushing and soaking the hulls, makes a really marvelous rich brown. If you dip it a few times in indigo you can actually get close to black, too. Pokeberries of course make a bright magenta, though the color isn't that fast. Though I have heard if you get the dyebath acidic enough, the color is permanent and won't yellow (which in this case means it goes to a dark red, or at least the batch I made last year has gone from purple to rich deep red. Not a bad color itself).

So we'll see how that goes. I didn't get any pictures, though it's not much to look at, honestly. Just a bunch of bright magenta stuff in a five-gallon bucket.

AEDM November 7th

Another confession. I fucking hate the artistic process. I really, really, really do. The phrase I always, always come up with is that it is like pulling my own teeth. For all that I don't want to know what I'm doing, well, maybe that has nothing to do with it after all, I don't know. But I only do it for the results, honestly. I hate the process. I really do.

Painting doesn't send me to some lovely zen-state where time no longer exists; always it is simply a chance for the monkey mind to rant (and rant) about awful things while the rest of my brain is occupied, and every millisecond is filled with rants and the petty stupidity of thought, even as whatever it is I'm making is being made (or making itself, maybe. I don't know).

And I get frustrated so easily. I mean, it's ridiculous, and has been proved over and over again, but when drawing, like, say, trying to get that hand right, I always, always despair that it will never work. Every single time. It always does, but that knowledge, that experience, never seems to take.

It's the same old block, I suppose, one that I've been trying to get around for several years now. One that I have in general left off fighting, because fighting it, rebelling against it, has not only proved to be useless but I swear only makes it stronger. So maybe this making art every day thing, on schedule, and with the intent to check in daily and show others, is just not a good idea for me. I can never tell. I'm not the type to force myself through something; I have found that it inevitably harms me in the process.

So, this is what I tried to paint today. I went at it not knowing what it was going to be, and not caring, either, or so I thought. But it got to a point where trying to decide what to do with it, or trying to judge what was the appropriate next step just met with all this, not resistance, I don't quite think, but all this stupid other stuff coming up, to the point where I was nearly in tears and just said fuck it. Fuck all of this. Now.



So I left off.

I swear, the only reason I paint is for the end result. Now, it's true, I don't really want to know everything about what it will be, and I want it to be its own thing—like a spell, where you say, I want this result, or better. It's that or better part that seems to fill itself in. Divinely? Maybe. Probably. And that's good.

I'm beginning to see it a bit now I think, this block, and what it is constructed out of. It all comes back to the hoarding, my father's hoarding, and the resulting neglect that was all a piece of it, and of being told, and shown, that my needs (really, anyone's needs but my father's) were not just unimportant but completely and quite impartially irrelevant. Personality disorder on my father's part, you see. I don't really want to get into any of it here, and I certainly hadn't planned to (that is what the hoarding blog is for), but, it is kind of the big issue I'm dealing with right now. And if there's one thing I've learned about myself is that things that are important to me permeate my entire life. I don't see how they can't, really.

So I think really this comes down to some part of me having been taught that I am simply not allowed to do what I want, to have what I desire, to behave as I like. And when I try to do any of those things, I am still coming up against the idea that I shouldn't, and I am bad. I know, that is the language of a child there, isn't it. Well yeah.

AEDM November 6th

So I designed that bookcase which will hold the fat quarters and which will go under my Muse pictures. Now, I'm not really much of a woodworker, not yet, anyway, though I'm a little further along than being confined to building birdhouses; but I'm no cabinet-maker, certainly. So I kept it simple. Simple, but with some design to it; and I figured I could probably make something simple but with a bit of an Arts and Crafts sensibility in the proportions. That I can do.

So here's the sketch. I should probably redraw it on graph paper, since the proportions of the thickness of the wood are a little off (since 1" wood is actually 3/4"), and I want to make sure it won't look anemic; still, I'm pretty happy with it.



Again, I don't have a scanner right now so I had to take a photo, which I played around with to get some kind of readable contrast. I like the effect, though; it makes it look like one of Leonardo's sketches, don't you think?

Although, really, for the full Leonardo effect it should look like this:



I don't know yet quite how I'm going to do that thick top, or the moulding on the thick top, but I'll figure it out.

And oh yes, that's a sketch of Sir Isaac Mewton's head over there on the side. He moved, of course.

AEDM November 5th

Art Every Day Month is always (well, okay, this is only my second time at it) kind of a mindfuck, honestly. Or at least it is given the way my mind works. I am a recovering insomniac and my productivity generally takes place in the wee hours. Which means I'm usually one of the last ones checking in at Leah's site and I feel like I've missed out on the discussion, or that I'm hopelessly behind and a disorganized loser or something.

I know. I'm just stating it. I do recognize that that's pretty silly. Also, dammit, I'm just not good with the pressure. Not, mind you, that I'm giving up on this already or anything; just that, as usual, I have to adapt the 'normal' way of doing things to my own deeply, deeply idiosyncratic brain.

I am finding the same thing happening that I did with the Goddess of the Week posts; that having an audience means I censor myself and am unwilling to, well, even start. I suspect I will just have to ignore that. I'm not sure what to do about it but the word 'freestyle' is coming to mind.

So with at least the scheduling issues in mind, I'm going to try something. It is ridiculously early by my usual schedule (it's not even 10pm here!), and I've already made something, which I will post below. I will try, also, however, to do something else, and post that tonight as well. But it will be after midnight and so will actually be tomorrow's entry. So that will put me a day ahead, which sounds (from here) to be lovely and relaxing, and should help relieve that feeling of pressure which is making me crazy. (Well, marginally more so than usual, ha.)

So. This is what I did today, for Art Every Day Month:

I still don't really have a lot to show. But I cut out some more grey squares for my Hallowe'enish nine patch quilt. Then I laid them down, and put my glasses on (that last part is important). Because once I could see them I was no longer so sure about the colors. So I cut out some of the plain grey cloth I had, and laid them down too. I think they are too dark. The effect is not what I want, really. Here's a look:



I corrected for color in Photoshop, but it's still a little on the magenta side, especially on the left.

The thing with grey, I am finding out, is that it has to be dead-on neutral (or ever-so slightly brownish warm) to read as grey. Even a little bit of blue in that grey means it's reading just as blue, especially in contrast to the orange, which is complementary and so tends to push it over. So I think I am going to have to just go with a solid ash grey, and one that is lighter than the solid I already have. Probably; this project is now in a stage where some mulling needs to be given space to happen.

You know, once in a while when I tell an artist acquaintance that I make quilts, I get a mocking response (honestly, usually from a dude artist). So I tell them what I have found to be absolutely true—that I used to think I knew a thing or two about color, and then I tried to make a quilt.

Because you are not only using other people's color choices and are not mixing any colors yourself, but you are also using patterns, which 1) do incredibly unpredictable things when placed next to each other, and 2) look entirely different whether viewed up close or from a distance. It is baffling and marvelous both.

So anyway, I'm going to put this particular quilt aside for the moment (at least until I can get some of the right color grey cloth). I don't know what I'm working on instead though. I'm sure I'll figure it out, though.

AEDM November 4th

Well I did a fair amount of artsy stuff today but I don't really have much to show. First I went to an off-the-beaten-track fabric store to see about getting more ash grey calico for the orange-black-and-grey quilt I'm working on; I found some there and got it. When I came home I threw it in the washer, then the dryer (since I always pre-wash all my cloth), and—gasp—ironed it. (I never ever iron.)

Then I cut a bunch of squares out of the grey.

So, like I said it was a fair amount of work towards that project, but I don't really have anything finished to show.

However, one of the other bits of cloth I got was this stripey stuff in milk and dark chocolate browns. I'd seen a lovely square quilt on a blog which I would really like to link to but cannot now for the life of me find; it was made by cutting striped cloth and piecing it back together to make concentric (consquaric?) squares. So I took the quarter of a yard of chocolate stripe and made these:



Given how weirdly they're cut, that's all I got out of that quarter yard (though I have a lot of odd-shaped scraps now). They're about seven or eight inches square.

I would like to make this one in warm colors, like the old m&m autumnal color scheme: dark brown, light brown, red, orange, yellow, and that yellowish green. I have a feeling it's going to take a while, since I'm kind of picky about the cloth. But that's okay. Any time I actually find some cloth that will work, I'll make as many of these squares as I can from it, then throw them on the pile.

AEDM November 3rd

I have a confession to make.

I don't like messy art.

No, that's not true.

I HATE messy art.

Still, when I was lying in bed last night trying to figure out what I wanted to do today for Art Every Day Month, I remembered I had the stuff to make monoprints.

We did them in art school. As you may have guessed by the name, unlike most prints, which are designed to be made in some kind of quantity, you only make one of these. What you do is ink up a sheet of glass with your ink and a roller, then put the paper (rice paper works well) face down on top. Then you draw on the back with a pencil or whatever, or, you can simply trace with a finger or fingernail. You can get some unbelievably black blacks with this, and they can be quite yummy.

So I set it all up, having first set the portable heater in the room to Quite Toasty; and sure enough, the cats could smell it and were soon scratching at the door to come in. They then promptly curled up and went to sleep in the lovely warm room, and I had my models. I am so clever.

I also did some sketches of hands and some drawings after some photos of trees I had.

I took a photo of the ones I liked since they aren't exactly scan-in-able all wet and sticky like that.



They are kind of fun, I guess, though not really my thing, like I said. And I got all paranoid about washing up afterwards, since the ink was oil-based. My studio room is also my sewing room, and black smudgy ink + nice clean cloth is not a happy thing. So, hmmm. Usually I do water-based paintings that have far less potential to get everywhere, but I've been wanting to do some oil painting, too. I don't know if it's going to be able to work in that room after all.

AEDM November 1st and 2nd

Okay, I kind of knew this was going to happen and it's all right. Monday was one of those thirteen hour days spent cleaning and hauling stuff till I pretty much fell into bed, exhausted; and I knew it would be. So the very first day of Art Every Day Month was a miss.

For the second day, though, I found myself up in my new studio room sitting there wanting to make something but not knowing where to start. So, even though I want to be doing more 2D sort of art pieces, I fell back on a quilt I've started. Which is also fine. Quilts are art, and even if it wasn't quite what I wanted to be doing it is a way of priming the pump, you know?

I did a dozen more nine patches on this quilt Tuesday night; I've got sixty so far, and the thing is meant to be twelve by fifteen. They're about five inches across right now, and will end up four and a half(ish). Though the thing with me and quilts is that I know I've got the bar set pretty high: I want them to be functional, which means, I want them to actually go on a bed. My problem? My bed is king-sized, and nobody in my family with smaller beds cares about quilts.

Here's a shot of them laid out five by twelve. They are posed on a pinkish lavender bedsheet of mine.



The squares in between the nine patches are going to be ash grey. Except ash grey calico/quilting fabric is proving very difficult to find. Crappy old Jo-Ann's just doesn't bother with unusual stuff. I'm going to poke around some local quilting stores and see what they've got, but I may end up having to make the grey a solid. I'd rather not, though. For now there are six grey ones posed in there.

Here's another shot of it run through Photoshop with the pink changed to grey (more or less) so you can get a better idea of what I'd like the colors to look like:



Spooky, don't you think?

Harvest

It's Samhain, and we haven't had a frost yet up in my part of New England; we're about two weeks overdue as the average first frost date is the fifteenth.

I did try to garden this year. I have had some success with it in the past. But this year the last week of May I started having some health issues which lasted all the way through to July, and which meant I really had to take it easy physically; and well if you miss June in the garden you'll never catch up.

That, and the critters this year were everywhere. We've had deer since a local supermarket put a giant new warehouse, with diesel trucks and lights running 24/7, right plunk in the middle of a large swath of woods just up the street; between them and the lily leaf-eating beetles (a truly horrific species in the larval stage, yikes) I've had to give up on the front lily garden. And of course we've always had groundhogs, the bastards.

But this year we also had rabbits. And my poor vegetable garden was inadequately fenced. Oh it had been well fortified once; but a couple years of poor maintenance (and luck) on my part meant the defenses were easily breached, and every time I jerry-rigged a fix another hole sprouted. And so anything I planted this year was pretty much immediately nibbled to the ground. That meant no beans, no cukes, no beets, zucchini, summer squash, not even any goddamned radishes, never mind lettuce. Even the stuff I put in as seedlings was eaten, though given that the tomatoes were eaten from the top down rather than the bottom up, I suspect deer rather than rabbits in that one.

All of course except for the one single jalapeno pepper plant. That one they left untouched. But given those health issues I now pretty much can't have spicy food. So I had an abundance of little hot peppers that I couldn't eat.

It was annoying, to say the least.

I used to check on it, though; hope, you know. But all that was left of the tomatoes were these inedible (to me) half-eaten things. So I'd pull them off the plant and chuck them behind the garden, into the tangled thicket of blackberry, wild rose, pokeberry and goldenrod that grew around an old woodpile. I was trying to keep the garden a little tidy, at least.

By the end of the summer I had pretty much given up on the vegetable garden for the year.

Instead we've been cleaning the yard. The short version (if you want the long version, again, check out the Tetanus Burger link on the sidebar) is that my father was a hoarder and the yard is (still) full of junk, though we've been cleaning it for years already. Seriously. It's a big project.

And so one day we were cleaning up a pile of transmissions or engines or something, over by the reclaimed area of my vegetable garden (the spot had once been a large brush pile). And there, in that area overgrown with blackberry, wild rose, pokeberry and goldenrod something red caught my eye. It was this:



Those are tomato plants growing there, thriving there, among the briers and weeds.

You have to understand, I have never had any luck starting tomatoes from seed, when done in the spring in little peat pots under a grow light. They get all spindly, or damp-off and die. I figured I just wasn't any good at it. So I was rather surprised.

But there they are, out in the open like that, healthy and uneaten.

Things will take care of themselves, I think. Our intent is worth something, even if it works out in ways we would not have foreseen. We can make a harvest of something we did not even realize we planted.

Honor

Okay, this is going to be a little tricky, and I don't know how much I want to share, given that that is my real name at the top of this blog; then again, it's only been my real name for not quite a decade yet, so there is still a bit of camouflage there.

But Hecate's post got me thinking. And now here's the part I don't want to get into, much.

I should warn you all first, I suppose, that this blog may now well descend into the occasional navel-gazing; and I guess I have two things to say to that. One, this is a blog, and one can hardly be surprised, as hello, this is a blog; and, two, that one should rightly check one's belly button on a regular basis, as a lotus may be sprouting there. You never know.

This is the time of year when it is traditional to honor the ancestors. The veil is thin, so they say, and the ghosty sorts crowd us round, as the leaves fall and the trees shift through their annual deaths. I can't say I can really feel it this year, though, as I still have that cotton in my ears of necessity. But that's okay, as it really has done wonders for my anxiety level.

So now to that navel-gazing part I'm not sure I want to share, about the ancestors.

Or, rather, about my father. A warning to the stray cousin who may have wandered here: if you do not wish to hear anything bad about your Uncle Walter, you may want to leave now.

You see, my father was a deeply broken person. I say was, even though he is not dead, because he is now in a nursing home after a stroke several years back, and he does not remember anyone. This is a good thing; a great blessing, in fact.

He was seriously mentally ill. I mean, not that we recognized it growing up; I am only able now to see that there was something really wrong with him, or put a name to it. But he had a personality disorder, a severe personality disorder, one called obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. This is not, it should be noted, the same thing as obsessive-compulsive disorder, no. They are not even, as far as I've been able to find out, particularly related, other than the similarity of names. OCD is perceived as not-quite-right by the person with it; they know, on some level, that the compulsions and rituals they perform aren't rational.

But personality disorders are different. They are perfectly in harmony with the ego. Which means that not only does a person with one think they are perfectly rational in their behaviors, they think they are right in doing what they do. Especially someone with OCPD, with its focus on perfectionism. Other personality disorders, by the way, include narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and the ever-fun antisocial personality disorder.

Anyway, this made my father, well, not fun. Actually it made him an impossible completely opaque control-freak who could not be reasoned with, even a tiny little bit. Oh, and he was a hoarder, too, of an extreme sort. If you wish to hear about this more in-depth, really, go read my other blog, Tetanus Burger. There is more than enough about him and the effects his behavior had on us over there, as, well, that's the stated purpose of that blog. I would like to especially direct you to a recent post on his OCPD.

So, back to the ancestors. Though I know that honoring them is a big part of this time of year, and of this religion of Paganism in general, it has never been something I've been all that interested in doing. I suppose some of it is that my family (to either side) is not all that close-knit. As a family we don't really do family. And that's fine.

And some of my family are just, well, dysfunctional, as Hecate put it. And I don't wish to honor that. Acknowledge, sure, that's fine, and healthy, as denial won't get you anywhere, but honor? Not really, no.

My father's father, my grandfather, died when he was young, when my father was I think eleven years old. My father was the eldest of three boys; so his father also left a six year old and a two year old. My grandfather died suddenly, and unexpectedly, in 1934, right in the middle of that Great Depression which also wiped out the family's savings. Fortune, actually, one might even say, or so I hear. There was money on that side, once, as evidenced by the numerous rich houses my ancestors built, including a big stone number that now functions as the Historical Society for the next city over.

So, bad times. And one could reasonably surmise that that childhood of loss, insecurity, and deprivation triggered my father's later hoarding.

His mother, so I have heard, was also a piece of work, perhaps a hoarder herself. I don't know; I was very very young when she died, and I don't remember her.

So. Back to things of a Pagan nature.

A couple years ago, my father came down with some kind of raging infection in the nursing home. He was taken to the hospital where they started pumping him full of intravenous antibiotics. We went to visit him there. He was running a high fever, and was very very out of it. Or, almost, to my Witchy eye, very very in it. Some part of him, it seemed to me, was seeing very clearly. Oh, not in an intellectual sense, of course; but some part of him knew he was very close to the edge, very close to dying. And he was terrified. Because he was completely unwilling.

I'm not surprised; the man was terrified of any kind of change, even the littlest sort. And it doesn't get much bigger than death for changes, does it?

But as much as I have reasons, good reasons, to dislike the man, or, even, to hate the man, I am a compassionate person. I think I am, anyway. Though at that point, really, it wasn't my father there. Just a scared, terrified person.

So when I got home I invoked my ancestors, his ancestors, though I had never felt the need to before.

I did not honor them. I did not ask nicely. I told my grandfather, the one who died young, that I did not know if he left willingly or unwillingly, but that his leaving had caused a profound mess, a real fucked-up pile of shit, one that my father had happily passed on to the rest of us. And so I told him that it was now his responsibility to get his ass over to that hospital bed and be there for my father. And the same for my grandmother, too. Because I sure as fuck was not going to do it. As if I could have anyway.

So I don't know about honor. I figure the ancestors are dead already. They can deal with the unvarnished truth.

Or maybe that is honor. I have always considered the telling of that kind of truth, that level of honesty, where nothing is sugar-coated and I just tell it straight from the soul, to be a form of respect. So maybe it is.

The next day my father was much better. Remarkably so, and the doctors commented on it, even. Though I don't remember now if I thanked them. The ancestors I mean. They still owe me, a lot.

Funny

I suppose I should say that I've no intention of shutting down or abandoning this blog; I fully intend to continue to write about Paganism, Goddesses, the numinous, &c. Just that right now I'm not sure what I want to write about, or if I wish to give the place a more precise focus. Probably not. I am a big fan of the organic, and forging ahead without anything but the roughest idea. I find that with that method what needs to come up, will. I have found it much more rewarding.

In art school we were taught to plan it all out thoroughly. Before brush hit canvas (or colored pencil Stonehenge paper) we were to have sketched it all out to a precise level of detail, rearranged all the elements to perfection, and have it all thought out intellectually.

This method is a sure-fire way to drain all vitality out of a piece of art. You want to lose that spark? Draw it once perfectly, then trace that onto the final piece and try to recreate what you just did. Or have it all thought out beforehand, so that anything that wishes to spontaneously arise can't.

I abandoned this long ago. I realize I am lucky in being able to do that. I am technically proficient enough that I can lean on that proficiency and know it will support me. I can wing it, as I go.

It is so much better to do it that way. I don't want to know what I am doing when I create. I want to look back on the process, this organic creation, this birth which involves a living creature, a living creation, a living work of art that is not me, and see what has come up. I want to see what it wants.

It's like sitting down to write when you don't know what you want to say. It is so much better, and you find out so much more, when you do that. Oh sure, sometimes it won't come, and you can't force it if it isn't ready; but if you ever find yourself thinking that you don't know what to say, then write. You will find out.

So then I guess I have answered my own question, the one I posed at the top of this as I just write this out straight and let it come: this blog, then, will likely focus on the creative process, from a Pagan, Divine, spiritual, numinous point of view.

Funny how that works.