I am bringing together all my blogging voices here. (How many blogs do I have? 5 or 6 personal ones, and more community ones.) Feeling the need for home, simplicity, still savoring the variety of a self-employed, creative life living on the edge of nature.
Summer is primarily functioning as a bed and breakfast host. I have guests coming today, and in a hour or so, I will clean the cottage fresh and crisp. My recent guests left this morning, heading to Yosemite for a few days before flying home to Texas. I clean the cottage in string "Virgo" fashion, which means I have a strict order for how and what I do, even down to the ironing of the sheets. I energetically sweep it clean and then the very last thing I do is literally sweep the deck and welcome mat.
Nine years ago I started blogging about the cottage on my Edge Almanac. There were no blogging websites then, so I put it directly on the Cort Cottage website. The talk was about nature and the changing of the seasons. The postings began to repeat themselves, as I glorified the buckeye trees in all their transitioning year after year. Many rainbow photos would appear, and wildlower photos.
The Deeper Well showed up several years ago, writing about nursing burnout in particular, and how to transenergize our lives. The Deeper Well became a personna on twitter in 2009 with daily "burnout blips" written to fit perfectly into the 140 character limit. Then Rumi quotes appeared in the enenings on the @thedeepwerwell twitter page.
Art was never out of the picture and found a voice called "It Could Be Art. Collage and papermaking and photography and mandala making morphed into The Other Shore Collection) . Organizing it (the Three Rivers Artists' Studio Tour) or supporting it with @art_talk on twitter and ThreeRivers Arts on facebook was my way on honoring the local creative juices. And there was (and is) the fun of discovery, seeing what artists are doing all over the world, and even bringing a few of them to Three Rivers to teach workshops for the Arts Alliance.
The crux of all of this is becoming a sexagenarian (no that is not someone who is into generic sex) and getting ready to go on social security. The strangeness of this cannot be described. And it's not about feeling old, or thinking old. Dying is closer that being born, and living is way too embedded in habits and comfort seeking. I find myself grieving for the eventual loss of this incredible life-knowing I have gathered this time around.
The only thing left to do is to give it away, a few words at a time, weaving each moment as a threads for integration.
Image via Tanglewood Threads
I love to serendipitously do google image searches
and look for ones I like, just like this one,
and then find another interesting blog like this one,
and maybe even find an idea to blend into my art...like this one.
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