(All photos from Greene Street)
A Mouse in Late Summer
I’m getting back in the groove of things right now. We’ll schedule a site hangout very soon!
So I was back from vacation last week, Avery was acclimated to Pre-K, I was walking back from giving a workshop with perfect, glorious weather, finally feeling 100% physically after 10 absurd months.
Thinking, ‘Man, I gotta soak up this feeling because it ain’t gonna last long.’
Four hours later, we had a mouse chew through our bathtub pipe and water leaked into our kitchen during a bath. Then Avery came down with a cold and slept only a few hours. He made it four days masked in his school before his first cold. Thankfully, it was minor and the leak was fixed after our contractors blew up the kitchen for a day, and an exterminator is coming Monday. We’ve never had a mouse before!
life can be darkly humorous sometimes.
Anyway, sorry for the personal stuff, but I promise it’ll tie in.
And I just wanted to say hi. I haven’t written one of these in awhile and missed you all, even though I’ve been loving your photos. I’m excited to get the hangouts and everything going again soon.
If you can, please help keep up with the site this Fall. An issue here is that I know we’re all busy and it can seem a lot to keep up with things. But just try to pop in for 10 minutes here or there and check out what’s going on. Nobody needs to keep up with everything!
With the year it’s been, I’ve been thinking a lot about balance. It’s the thing I’m the worst at, but trying to work on. It’s a common topic with my therapist. A little bit here and a little bit there. I’m an all-at-once person, if you hadn’t noticed.
But how do we create art when we’re balanced?
I watched some random video with some random artist a few weeks ago. All I remember is him saying that he caused himself pain because we can’t create good art without pain.
At first, it seemed like an interesting statement, and I might-have-sort-have agreed in the moment.
But then I realized how ridiculous that was. Yes, pain creates such profound art. Probably a majority of great art is based on pain, but I wonder if that’s because often the story is right there in front of you. You have to get it out, it’s a form of therapy. It’s a healing process.
But art can come from other feelings too – out of joy, balance, even out of boredom. It’s just a little less obvious how to find that story. And it may not pour out of you that quickly.
This semester, and I want to start thinking of this place in a semester system, I want you to think about how to find a story. Some of you might be telling the story already or have it in your head. But for a lot of you, just think about searching for it. It can be anything.
I was fascinated with how the challenge sparked some (not all) of you out of lulls. Because if you looked at that list, every damn photograph you could possibly think of could be classified as something on the list!
Feels like summer… it was summer! Unless you’re in Australia.
I’m sort of joking, but it was so cool to see, because this list, encapsulating everything, sparked you to search and to find the parts of that list that interested you the most. And you explored.
We’re all extremely capable of telling interesting stories. If you’ve had the faith to stick it out with me in this place, you’ve got something to say. I know it’s easy to feel insecure about that, but give it a go. Now you just have to figure out how to search for it.
And some of you have already been searching for it, and capturing it, but you now need to learn how to organize it together.
We’re going to talk a lot more about that coming soon. For now, enjoy the last week of summer!
