Our love Is-real

journal art

i found these scans of some of my old journals from peru. being there seems so long ago but when i read some of the stuff i was writing, i really could have written it today. they are still the same big questions about passion and balance and how to best handle suffering. i still find refuge in the small details, the tasty bits of life. it makes me think that maybe we don't really ever figure anything out. maybe we just keep asking the same questions in more interesting ways and keep calling it art.

it remind me of when one of my old friends from college came to dc recently to visit. i hadn't seen him in ten years and in the meantime, he had made some major life changes--become a buddhist, a vegetarian, finished school. he was eager to know all the ways he had changed but aside from some physical details, he pretty much seemed to be the same person. he had the same slightly biting sense of humor matched with a compassionate listening skills. we had a blast singing karaoke and eating basement thai food. after all that time, i still liked him for the same reasons i liked him in the first place. he was a little disappointed in my answer that he was pretty much the same but i really like the idea that we can't really change, can't really get it too wrong.

so i offer these few pieces like i made them today, next week and i know these lessons will still keep swirling about us all, like time taunting us for our faulty memory.

I want a soul train party for my birthday.

Happy in small ways.

Testing the photobooth set up (which came together so well--ask me if you ever need to make one)

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive along past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”--Edith Wharton

(My lovely friend Jaime, with whom I stayed in Little Rock, had this quote on her fridge and I kept reading it and saying "yes!" Now it's become my new manifesto for growing older and enjoying life just as long as I can. I would personally add yoga to this list but then I want to add yoga to every list)


Polly and Jaime with the beloved dragon hat.