Hello from the creative expanse!
I’m wrapping up my monthlong creative sabbatical here in Castine. As with all things, life speeds up and slows down when I spend a month away from home base. Every happening becomes expansive, and I find my days completely filled with moments I never want to forget.
I met someone today that I’ve seen over the last four years. He rides his bike and collects cans for redemption. This year,he upgraded his ride to an electric bike. At a friend’s house, I met his daughter. He worked as an electrical engineer on oil rigs before retiring, and going off the grid, and raising his family.
The beach looks the same and so different, as it seems the two bad storms made the giant rocks at the steps disappear. Yet the low tide continued to yield amazing treasures - ballast from ships that visited the harbor centuries ago. Our favorite dinner spot abounded with delightful food, yet the raspberry patches were gone, replaced with more magnificent flowers,and the monarchs came to roost.
My son, now 7, stays up later than our first years here. We left the tv off many nights after dinner, opting for sunset rock skipping or a swim, or card games, or making drawings together. After he goes to bed, and the house is quiet, I notice the crickets are chirping, a recent emergence marking the beginning of the end of summer. The church bells just ring the hour of 9, and ring all day and all night, but I have become accustomed and do not stir. Besides that, not another sound can be heard.
After a full day of making, without breaks for meetings, or to answer staff questions, or work on admin tasks, my hands are crampy, my golfer’s elbow is in full effect, and my left shoulder feels pinchy, sensations that were not present in prior years. But my body has also taken notice of the perennial gifts - how my legs carry me up and down this hilly town with more ease each day, the way my hair becomes a beautiful frizzy salty pouf, and the abundance fruit to forage, starting with black raspberries in the first week, and ending with blueberries and raspberries before we go.
This is the second time I have been in residence at Annex Arts, and the first year without a pandemic looming over our lives. The Annex has been a gracious home for so many of us artists, and I was happy to get cozy and get to work amongst a group of painters. I even found myself playing muse to one painter in particular. We have spent hours together now, and I have taken great comfort in being seen by this prolific human.
In all of this expansiveness, I made work, counting, knotting, counting, tying, counting, cutting, repeat. Repeat, repeat,repeat. Listening, finding moments of presence amidst moments of absence. Just like at home. But not. A different expanse.
There’s a great Bruce Lee quote about water that I’ve written about before, and there will always be part of me that wishes to be more like water. But lately, I’ve had a sea change - in this iteration, this moment, my creative expanse is like this one big boulder off the shore where the forest breaks to the sea in Little Deer Isle. I slept on that boulder 21 years ago on my first visit to Maine. Hiked out to it at night with a friend, carrying nothing but a sleeping bag. After climbing to the top of the boulder, we fell asleep. I awoke to the sun ablaze. Peeking my head out, I noticed we were surrounded by water- it was high tide. My friend told me to go back to sleep, it was 4:30 am. I woke up three hours later. The tide was out, the path back to the forest revealed. It was time to climb down, and get ready for our day.
I’ve thought so much about that night on the boulder over the last two decades. I revisited Little Deer Isle and that forest that led to the sea and that boulder a few days ago. I couldn’t see the boulder, but I know it was still there.
Sometimes we are the water, but often we are the big boulders, rising and vanishing in the highs and lows, but always there.
Part 2 coming soon.