A Pause in a Struggle

This is Dad's dog Sophie. Dad got her from the animal shelter and she appears to be mostly Ebizan hound. She runs like a gazelle and rarely barks. She and the cats had a face off through the studio door, three tails puffed up three times their size, cats laying flat to the floor and Sophie's head down, but no growling or hissing. Today Cruiser wants to go out, even though he can see Sophie right outside the door. All three want to spend their day laying in the dirt and sun, but I'm not ready to see if they can do this together. Sophie picks up chunks of sap in the yard that get in her hair and had two big dark pieces stuck on her face that looked like scars and made her look like she'd been in a bar brawl, so over the weekend I got them out with butter and a comb. This takes a bit of work, but Sophie got to lick the leftover butter off of my hands and is now my best friend.

My friend, another artist, used to say about doing other things before starting an art project, "I'm not procrastinating, I'm mentally preparing myself." So today, I have two drawings on the watercolor paper and a set of reference out for studies that do not need a drawing, and I cleaned under the sink. The cleaning is a combination of wanting to feel like I'm earning my keep, my inability to tolerate mess, and mental preparation. Putting that first paint to blank white paper is always a struggle. Once I get started, procrastination is not an issue, but today starting will now be after my lunch and a nap.



Being at my Dad's feels like a pause in a struggle. Life has been so hard for the last few years and nothing I tried seemed to work out. How do you get over feeling failure and devastating loss? How do you move on? Everyone says move on, but a year after selling my house I wasn't feeling it, I still felt sad and angry. I found a picture of a tree at my house a few months ago, a tree that I used to call the tree that God planted because I thought it was a weed and tried to pull it out a few times, but it kept coming back so I finally gave up and let it grow and by the time I left that tree was 10 feet tall, but the picture made me cry. At Dad's I finally feel some recovery, like I'm building strength in reserve.