reverse threading

the path back is the path forward


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moonglow. [kerri’s blog on k.s. friday]

it was late night on the train platform. though we had walked from the station when we arrived, our boys dropped us off for the way back home. the train was a wee bit late and there were a few people on the platform waiting, some a bit impatiently. we were tired but not impatient, grateful to not be driving home from the city.

the clouds and the moon got together, plotting a bit of choreography. nearly full, this waxing gibbous was extraordinarily bright, backlighting the cotton balls of clouds passing in front of it. with wildfire smoke particles catching the light, an orange glow encircled the white moon peeking out, the glow much like the salt lamp emits in my studio. we stood on the platform, waiting for the train, completely captivated by the sky above us.

in recent days i have been reading old journals. journals almost fifty years old. these were the days when i passed through teenage years. when my days and nights were long and full of adventures: dancing at discos and early sunrise photo shoots, beach-camping and scuba diving, fishing and arboretums and county parks and apple-picking, skiing and my red round transistor radio on a picnic blanket. they were days of my little blue vw bug and growing-up-nuclear-family time, guitars and poetry, climbing trees and frisbee and term papers, bike hikes, the mall, my dog missi and a plethora of friends. i was often writing in my journal at 2am, wide-awake, reviewing my day, waxing poetic, loving life. it is a pilgrimage into the innocent.

my late-nights are different now, indeed, than way back when. sleep is now something i really adore, much more so than when the most minimal amount seemed – maybe – necessary.

because i am reading and reading and reading, i am feeling somewhat immersed in back-then.

these days i turn on the salt lamp that sits on the chifforobe. i don’t do it every day, but right now seems a good time for it as i hold space for the going-through of things of the past. from this vantage point – looking back – i know the shatter of innocence comes. the voice in my journal changes.

the glow stays with me as i pass by the studio door.

and now, as sleep eludes me at night, i lay under the quilt and gaze at the moon illuminating the blinds.

*****

IN THE NIGHT © 1997, 2000 kerri sherwood

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the hypotenuse. [kerri’s blog on two artists tuesday]

i have always been drawn to notebooks. composition books, spiral notebooks, journals, graph paper pads, legal pads, pa-pads – really, i guess, any kind of bound group of paper. blank paper.

it all represents a beginning. “begin anywhere,” john cage urges on a piece in my studio.

but sometimes there is a paralysis. sometimes there is something – some quirk – that stops me from starting – it stops me from putting pencil or pen to the first page. i feel this very big responsibility to the new blank paper. sometimes it feels like what i might write, compose, jot down may not be worthy of the first pristine sheet in a new paper vessel that could – ultimately – contain hundreds of writings, compositions, jottings. i haven’t yet gotten over that.

and so i dig out old spirals that my children used in elementary school – with wide rule lines – or high school – with college rule lines. their names are on the front and i can – delightedly – still find scribblings inside the notebooks. lab results or math problems, vocabulary words or drawings or paragraphs of tiny stories they were creating – it’s all thready for me and so this stack of old spirals and folders speak to my heart – in so many ways. i can easily write in these.

but there are those really delicious new books, new pads, new journals. and i glance at them, wondering when i might think that anything i might pencil in them would be worthy of their newness.

just staring at the beach was zen-full. it was quiet. almost pristine.

the beach had been combed – stunning horizontal lines – raked, perfectly clean but for a few sets of footprints walking – along the horizontal and taking the hypotenuse to the water.

the orderliness was just a tiny bit interrupted. and the orderliness was waiting for more disorderly. the disorderly would mean people – walking and running, children playing and building castles in the sand, seagulls clamming, dogs digging, sand flying.

even as i write this, i think about pulling out one of the brand new notebooks. taking my ever-present mechanical pencil to the first page (or maybe the second – to leave the first page clean and blank).

it makes me think that maybe the disorderly – the walking, running, building, digging, sand-flying – might actually be the real joy.

it makes me think i just might walk the hypotenuse across the college-ruled page. and wreak a little havoc on some clean paper.

maybe.

*****

read DAVID’s thoughts this TWO ARTISTS TUESDAY

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buymeacoffee is a website where you may directly impact an artist whose work directly impacts you. xoxo