What We Choose to Keep
I have a fondness for things other people might throw away.
Old photographs of people I never knew. Handwritten grocery lists. Pages torn from forgotten books. Ticket stubs, receipts, faded postcards, scraps of paper with someone else's handwriting.
100 Days of Collecting My Life
This morning, I went for a walk.
Nothing particularly extraordinary happened. I do this most every morning. I followed a familiar route, noticed the changing season, and gathered a few things along the way. A leaf. A stem. Various seed pods. Little bits of the world that caught my attention.
I brought them home.
And later, in my studio, I made a collage.
It's just six inches square. A small arrangement of things collected, considered, and composed. Nothing monumental. But when I finished, I placed it in a basket on my worktable, where it will be joined by another tomorrow.
And another the day after that.
One hundred days. One hundred collages.
The Beautiful In-Between
I've been having a little trouble finding my rhythm lately.
I came home from Yellowstone with a head full of ideas, a tin full of treasures, and all sorts of creative enthusiasm. I imagined myself settling back into the studio, spreading everything out on the table, and picking up where I'd left off.
Except that's not quite what happened.
Instead, I've been wandering around in a curious state of almost.
Almost ready to begin something. Almost caught up. Almost finding my way back into a familiar routine.
There are projects in various stages of becoming. New things I'm learning to do. Ideas scribbled on scraps of paper and tucked into notebooks. Packages to assemble, words to write, plans to make. Some very exciting things are happening, and I'm genuinely delighted by them.
But man, there are a lot of moving parts.
And I haven't quite figured out the choreography.
Collecting | Yellowstone
There are many ways to remember a place.
You can take photographs. Buy the postcard. Bring home the sticker. Write down where you went and what you saw.
Or you can begin to collect the place while you are still inside it.
That’s what I found myself doing in Yellowstone.
I arrived with a battered old book I’d turned into a travel journal, a tiny watercolor palette, a little notebook for field notes, a vintage tobacco tin, a pen, and a canvas bag that said:
I notice because I make.
I make because I notice.
Which, it turns out, was exactly the right equipment.
Not because I intended to make beautiful pages while sitting beside geysers.
I didn’t.
I wanted something much simpler.
I wanted to pay attention.