Inktober Day 19: Sling
Back to the prompts, sort of.
Inktober Day 18: Yeah OK, I’m completely ignoring the official prompts by now. It was fun for a while, but when I’m short on time or tired, it’s too much work.
I have become the Baker of Pretzels for The People’s Pint, where I work. Today was a pretzel-baking day, and I got home late after all the rest of my work as bookkeeper. But the pretzels are pretty, and I’m proud of them π
Back to the tangle of everyday life, trusting that the openness, connection and kindness I found over the weekend will stay with me even when I have to turn all my attention to pragmatic tasks.
At the end of a longer than expected day, I sat with paper and ink, just to doodle and playΒ but I think the result is a kind of self-portrait of re-integration of the magical weekend retreat with the regular world as I have come to move through it.
Though I didn’t plan it, it still reads as a face with a different expression, turned upside-down.
Back home in my studio, rich with the memory of singing together to the point that I lose myself into the sound, and lose the sound of my own voice in the tapestry we wove together.
Did I mention that the full moon lit the night the entire weekend, even with occasional cover of clouds. The lake, the surrounding tree-clad hills burnishing to gold and red and brown in the day, webs of pale and dark in the night. As the season changes to cold, I need the reminder to go outside, to breathe.
AND ALSO: Twilight Covening marks the anniversary of my daily drawing practice, which I started during Sarah Rosehill’s Otter Clan 10 years ago.
10 years of daily drawings. When I started, I had no ambition or idea that I would still be doing this now.
Inktober Day 13: I had time this afternoon for a long break, to walk around the lake and find a place in the sun. The lake is low this year; there are beaches in new places to me. I could see where the water carved out under the mat of roots, making little caves where the waterline normally is. This network of roots made wave shapes.
Inktober day 10: Pattern
My first formal schooling was at Mrs. Coventry’s School in Dacca, East Pakistan. I loved when we were assigned to copy patterns on lined paper. To my American ears, it sounded like “pattens”. I think the theory was dexterity practice toward eventual penmanship
I still love repeating designs, and I love the feeling of writing longhand, even when I don’t have words I want to write. That doesn’t bother me; as a child I was surrounded by writing in characters I was not taught to read, and by languages I never really learned to speak.
I still love to hear the sound of other languages even if I don’t understand them, and various non-language calligraphy makes its way into not a few of my drawings.