The beginning of a really interesting time.

I've been busy here--and while I strongly believe in the concept of blogging without obligation, I've missed this little corner of my life. I've had wonderstrange arts take over a healthy part of my free time, and that's a good thing, but I really love my own blog, too.

I'm taking this summer off--no teaching, no work obligations at all--to write poetry, to submit to publications, and to try to organize my recent work into a manuscript so that I can begin sending it to presses in the hopes of finding a home for my first collection. I'm also planning on doing some day traveling this summer . . . there is a wonderful residency available to Oregon writers and artists that does require some place-based writing. So, I'll be visiting some of the parks in Southern Oregon to work on some newer place-based pieces, too.

And, while I don't usually spend time on here wallowing about personal issues, I do think it's valid to state that I am also going through a bit of a transitional period in my personal life, which can prove time-consuming as well. While I'm unsure of what the future holds for my home life, I do know that my writing and my art--as well as the friends I have in both the writing and art communities to which I belong--will pull me through it all.

So, I'm looking forward to keeping up over here at the blog a bit more regularly--and writing might be a stronger focus over the journaling or art right now, but I plan to just use the summer as a cathartic thing. Rather than swallowing scars over the next few months, I'm going to do my best to purge them.

My 40th Birthday and my Art Journal

So, I turn 40 tomorrow--I've dreaded this birthday for the last several years, but now that it's arrived, I'm really not bothered by it. I'm thinner than I've been in several years, I'm happier here in Oregon than I was in Pittsburgh, and I have a lot of wonderful friends that I hadn't even met yet at 30. Currently, my hubs and I both work within 8 miles of our house, we both have full-time jobs, and we've lived together since May of 1997 (proving to me that this might be my one example of where loving has won out over fighting.) My husband and I are a little house poor right now, which wasn't the case when I was employed in Ohio--but, frankly, who ISN'T a little house poor right now? Anyhow.

The prompt at A Year in the Life of an Art Journal for mid-February was "Fight," so as I worked on this latest page in my 2011 journal, I kept my birthday in mind. I've always been tickled by the saying, "I'm a lover, not a fighter," because I'm really a fighter more often than a lover. lol! So, this entry just seemed to grow from that . . . and I'm pleased with the blue-eyeshadowed crazy-woman in the lower right corner, too.

Art Journal: A Year in the Life

I've not been keeping up extraordinarily well with the prompts at A Year in the Life of an Art Journal, but I figure that it's still good practice to keep myself journalling more often than I would without a twice-monthly prompt. The first prompt of the new year was to choose a word that would, in effect, be a touchstone for the new year. And, if we could, we should try to work feet into our page. :)

I thought it was too much at first, but I am tickled with how my page came out! My word for the year is "true," which I really loved in terms of trying to keep in mind that I need to be true to myself, but also remain true to my goals and my family. The feet are wearing shoes that I'd never personally purchase or attempt to wear, but there is something distinctly badass about them--so they were pulled from a fashion magazine and added to the page before i started writing.