Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and the day itself was lovely.  Leading up to and following from the day has been really, really hard, and I want to understand why.  Nothing has happened to drive these days to such a profound tiredness, and I have given myself hours upon hours of sleep and naps.

At Thanksgiving, Colleen noted how getting older brings cynicism; we have too much experience (and perhaps bitterness) to maintain an open sense of possibility.  I offered skepticism over cynicism; my idealism may be aging but I am not wired for cynicism.

What I am noticing more than skepticism is a growing remoteness.  My day-to-day emotional life is a vague internal jumble that I co-exist with more than examine.  (Remoteness is built into that sentence, like my emotions inhabit me rather than are me.)  Only an event seems to elicit raw, insistent feeling.  What was once an internally driven process now often needs an external stimulus, something to catch me off-guard and penetrate.

A parallel lull is emerging in the studio.  My interior life is not driving the work as it did.  Outside events tap the same internal concerns, but need to find fresh forms.  A search for the next way to work seems to be opening.  It's inevitable, but brutal.  It is being in the studio with no ideas, moving from place to place, doing nothing or doing anything, and (actively) waiting, for weeks or months.  It is finding reasons to avoid the studio to avoid the lostness, yet knowing I have to be there to catch the next shift.  Was it Picasso who said that inspiration exists, but she has to find you working?  I detest the word "inspiration" (I can be a cynic!) and think Picasso maybe did too.

My work from Memphis is on its way home, and I look forward to seeing it.  Timmy's remains came home with me yesterday, and that was very hard and sad.