Hello Blog Friends! I do miss posting here as I am spending more time over on Substack. You may also be signed up there as well, and I’m grateful for that. Really and truly…your email-box doesn’t know whether you receive a post from me via Substack or via my blog. On the receiving end of things I don’t think it makes much difference. But here, on my website blog, I do so like to place my words and drawings, photos of things I’m working on, to keep a record of continuance. After all, I started blogging oh so many years ago, and there are a few of us who continue to post on our blogs. Alicia Paulson, Ann Wood, Jude Hill and a new-to-me-but-longtime-blogger Vanessa Valencia are folks I still enjoy visiting right there in their longtime blog-homes. So I will likely continue to post here every now and again.

Not only does it feel like returning home when I post to my blog, but when I draw in my sketchbook I feel like I’ve come home as well. It’s an interesting thing to have drawn and painted and collaged in a book full of blank pages for as many years as I have done (26 and counting:). When I open my current sketchbook, something wafts in the air akin to fairy dust before I’ve even set pen to paper. It almost doesn’t matter what I put down…it could be sloppy paint or well-defined lines and anything else I imagine or desire. Just the act of sketching something from my day or my imagination, is a homecoming to a place where beauty lies, even if it is yet to be uncovered as I draw.

I can remember, way back when, the strong desire I had to create a blog filled with mostly my drawings from my humble small-town life. I’d like to resume doing that. But I am also more realistic in what my time allows. I am the queen of starting down new (or previously-trodden) paths, only to find I can’t keep up the pace with all the other things I have started and committed to.  Do you have this issue? Is it only me? It may very well be. I’m sure you are much more reasonable! I seem to have an endless curiosity that lures me into all kinds of fun and wonderful creative adventures. Following the meandering path is ever so delightful especially when Life cooperates and allows deep dives into whatever is tickling my fancy. 

Currently, my fancy is tickled by imaginative worlds, fairy-type tales, stories that traipse through my head and find their way into my writing journal and sketchbooks. I have no idea if I’ll ever publish these, but it sure is delicious to take moments dreaming about mice who knit and spin and weave, or a bear who wants to go for walks in woods, enchanted by every wildflower and tree. I could not have better friends here in my studio, for these things are my favorite things too! I’d like to write down some of our adventures with a drawing or two here and there. 

For now, with Life as full as full can be, I am content to sit outside and sketch our yard, or the flowers on my table, or the giant lily pads I saw on a walk with my son and our brand-new first grandchild, or the mouse I saw who surely skittered off under the trailing petunia to her own room to knit or spin some wool she nabbed from a venture into my studio!  For now, just opening my sketchbook and making a few marks is a happiness that goes with me just about everywhere.