Week Four Notes

Week Five Notes

Week Six Notes

Being overwhelmed trying to think bigger, I go back to thinking smaller.  I keep coming back to my flimsy journal. The delicateness of the paper is beginning to interest me. The way it crinkles with the glue. The way it is too thin to hold paint. I like the tactile-ness of leafing through the brittle pages. I pulled some teabags and onion and garlic skins out of the trash and began gluing them down. There’s tiny marks and lines and scars in all these things naturally. Like maps. Instead of being a painter, I’m learning how to make marks, and observe the beautiful things just in the trash! What a welcome change. 

 I can’t separate my writing from my drawing. They always belong together. 

Swamplands. Where messy things get to dance.

You know how when you have in your head a few notes of a tune but you don’t know what it is, and if you hum it, it ends up becoming a different song from the one that’s nagging at you? Or when you remember a street corner but you can’t remember where it is? That kind of thing. My mother liked to use the word frantumaglia—bits and pieces of uncertain origin which rattle around in your head, not always comfortably.

I’d had in my mind for years to a sudden selection of fragments, welded into a story that seemed convincing—that escapes me, I can’t give an honest account. I’m afraid that it’s the same thing as with dreams. Even as you’re recounting them, you know that you’re betraying them.

Elena Ferrante

Walking women. End pages of Camino journal.

 Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, 
raised a huge stone from it, 
and left it leaning. 
It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. 

“That is the way,” he said. 

“But there are no stairs.” 

“You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”  



- GM 

"I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, 

like the chestnut bur,

 and my eyes like the sherry in the glass

 that the guest leaves."

-emily dickinson

“Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of another world; and I did not like the return to ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow. In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking. That night my imagination was baptized.”    -C.S. Lewis