Cookies at Work

Originally uploaded by Zanalee

A collaborative effort by anonymous co-workers, and me. Yes, I can be this childish. It keeps me alive.
LOL!

warmwind_elemental

warmwind_elemental
Originally uploaded by jillbliss
I discovered Jill Bliss years ago when a co-worker gave me a lovely card designed by her as a thank you for a scarf I had made her for her for Christmas. Okay wait actually, I had purchased a journal she designed a while before that. I hadn't realized she designed stationary in general until I received that card. As you may or may not know I am a stationary glutton. I have stationary collected and saved up from over ten years ago. I probably have stuff I don't even know I have. I've fantasized about having a pen pal all my life but as technology progresses, that seems less and less likely to happen. Still, I am a romantic.

My first job ever was working retail at Kates Paperie in Soho. They had some of the most amazing journals, cards, rubber stamps, old school wax seal stamps, fountain pens, and you name it in paper goods. They even had workshops and illustration presentations. But we never got Jill Bliss whom I didn't even know about way back then.

JB is very much into nature which I believe is one of the reasons why her work appeals to me so much. Major themes of the sea, the woods, the sky, the stream and the story in these elements embody many of her illustrations. I keep up with her latest stuff, her studies ad collaborations on her flickr site. This one above was done by five artists including her.

One More Look at You

Somewhere only we know

I don’t remember exactly how many times I’ve been back to Bard College after I dropped out in ’96. It used to be one of my deepest, most painful regrets. I think I kept going back to see if it hurt less each time I went. Bard is a strange and beautiful, improbable little place and I know now, why I had to leave, although I can’t quite verbalize it. I no longer feel there is a need to. This last visit though, may have been my last visit in true.

What’s weird for me about time, is that after a while, what ever I hold onto becomes internalized. I discovered a while ago that your memories of a place can never again be matched by the place itself, not quite and once you move on, you don’t need to hold as much anymore to the past. It’s just a sort of law of nature. There’s only so much you can hold on to at once in your mind and heart. In order to truly function and live you have to move forward, and be present in the now. Once you’ve made the decision to do that, old things, which no longer serve any purpose in your world are like dead weights that fall away. And all of a sudden, I’m riding without training wheels or without anyone holding me up. Sorry to throw that weird metaphor in but that’s how I understand it. It was like magic to me when I was a little girl, how my dad would try to teach me to ride a bike by first holding on to the back and pushing me for a while. At some point I would hear him and my brother yelling from behind me, “You’ve got it! You’re doing it! Keep on going!” or something like that. I would look back, see that my dad was not holding the bike any longer and stop and fall over just like that.

Fear had taken hold. I didn’t know how to get there by myself. Or did I? Many years later after we had left Brooklyn to move into a house in the Bronx, I taught myself how to ride one summer in our back yard. I was bored. There’s nothing like teaching yourself something you never thought you would be able to do. Nothing.

But getting back to memory, I realize as I get older that memory consists of holding on to a picture of physical spaces at a particular time in your life which will never come again. I have always believed that places have energy or a spirit.That energy or spirit combined with whatever time you spend there and the people with whom you form bonds with creates memories, which can never be replicated by simply visiting the place, because now there are only ghosts and projections. What you experienced now lives inside you. What lives inside you is yours alone.

There are times when I will go rifling through the attic of my mind for a deep wound, checking to see what progress it has made in healing and suddenly I notice, I don’t need to do that anymore, that it is very far from me, in another time, so fuzzy, it’s not worth squinting to focus on, because I’m to busy focusing on the now. And it’s so strange! Once upon a time it meant everything! It was so intense and dramatic, so desperate! And now it’s like a faded kiss, dissolving on someone elses' forehead in a drama played out in another world. I’m done. But I’m not finished.