sand | reverse threading

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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one summer, (almost) every single day, i took The Girl and The Boy to the beach. not the beaches on lake michigan, for the water there is way too cold, but a beach that is inland in our town and is man-made. that was the summer-of-the-best-tan and the summer i loved packing and re-packing our beach bag, a small cooler with drinks and snacks and buckets and plasticware and shovels for building castles in the sand.

they were littler then and it was easy to keep them happy on the beach. when The Boy was reeeally little, he, like his dad, did not the feeling of sand in his toes. he preferred to stay on the blanket or the beach towel. but at this time in his life – the-summer-of-the-beach – he loved it. he played in the sand and the water as much as every child there, including his big sister and me.

looking at this morsel SANDCASTLE WITH ME from the painting SPOONS AND SANDCASTLES makes me want to go back. go back and do it again. repeat that summer. play in the water more. have more icepops from the refreshment stand. stay late until the sun was almost directly on the horizon. and make more sandcastles.

click here (or on the image above) for SANDCASTLE WITH ME products

click here or on image below to see the original painting SPOONS AND SANDCASTLES on david’s gallery site