Casa Dolce Casa
“I feel at home here - I feel quite - my skin feels close to the earth, when I walk out into the red hills as I did last night - my cat following along like a dog”
- Georgia O’Keeffe
Winter is a delicate time, a time when you tell yourself it is great to be inside that you will lock yourself in the house, finish projects, bake wholesome delights, clean out the fridge, make your own soap, but then what happens? Your hands are freezing, it’s cold inside, the garden is turning into a jungle, the fire needs lighting, the kids want to go the snow (frosted morning walks to school are already turning me off, mission go north) and a thick layer of dust has settled on your long overdue plan to publish your second book. This is me, welcome to my world.
Suddenly all of those secret, happy plans land like a paper mache ball when it cracks before it has dried, splatting glue all over your nice clean tiles. Sticky and wet, dream on lady.
Home, a bittersweet song I sing daily somewhere between a tour of duty, secret epiphanies in the sun and life repeating ad nauseum. I relent, life is good. This may sound desperate, I know this is the cyclical nature of living a creative life.
Seed pods from last summer
And then there is the magic of opening a book and reading a quote by May Sarton about the light and the writing life and after all of these years the same piece that inspired me so long ago resonates and allows me to breathe a little deeper....
“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened”.
By May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude: The Intimate Diary of a Year in the Life of a Creative Woman
So yes, the creative heart must begin again and again, day after day, one must never forget that. Open a new book, write another true thing, squeeze the colours onto the paint palette, plant another seed, till the soil and all of that. Sometimes it is easy to forget that each day a new beginning, another opportune sensual moment to create. It’s all here beckoning one at the door.