Paring down, living quietly.

My second year in Germany has morphed into more of a solitary artistic existence. Meaning I have a lot of quiet time at home alone. Some might consider me antisocial. But I don't feel lonely. And I don't feel hermit-like. It feels like an in-between world. With the navy sky seeping through my windows, the fuzzy glow of incandescents dropping light across the floor and onto my pages.

I've restructured my home, moving a table into the living room for painting, and a chair to the kitchen to watch life and snow float by on lazy weekend mornings.

I want to restructure more. This quiet life feels good. There is no race to the end. With improper lighting, I create little sketches of photos I've taken. Some are hideous, others are not. But what it's really about is the scratch of the charcoal across the pages simultaneously dragging darkness and creating shadows.

Life is movement in and out of the shadows.

Boast of Quietness

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious that meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow groves's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass throught the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he dowsn't expect to arrive.

-Jorge Luis Borges

(printed inside The Inheritance of Loss)