Light and Shadow

I have recently immersed myself in the Substack community and spent time both familiarizing myself with this space and finding kindred souls🦋  The last couple of weeks have been spent reading, reading & reading!  Both on Substack and books that I’ve found through Substack authors.

 Hard books, beautiful books, words so cutting into my soul that I find I need to catch my breath and reframe my thoughts in a new, expanded light.  I would love to take pictures of the book covers and annotated pages…. but I’m a Kindle girl… you know.. a woman of a certain age that simply needs to be able to adjust the font size 🙄. As much as I like to feel the weight of a book in my hand and touch the pages I turn, the bulk of my reading is digital. 

I have also found projects to join and challenge myself.  I am learning to hone my voice with Kerri from Glimmers class. Already I am writing in a way that I have never been able to do, even after reading The Artists Way years ago. We have only just begun the class and I am completing my morning pages with relative ease. I somehow feel that I have permission to be perfectly imperfect in this practice. This acceptance of my individual process is something that I have not experienced before and it is wholly freeing.

I’m also attempting an art project.  I have not done much drawing since high school, when I took an art class at Long Beach State based on the work Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Writing and acting had always been more my thing.  Then about 8 years ago I really got into photography.  I was seduced by the light; the seasons, the sun’s direction, the bokeh!  With this new challenge from Michele at #100daysofwonder2024 I am drawing again.  B and I went on some errands today and I found myself noticing not so much the light, but the shadows, nature’s shading of space and depth.  Wow!  So crazy to me that both these forms of art, in my mind are opposites, yet compliments.  Light and shade; Yin and Yang; parts of a whole.  Even more astonishing is that after only a few hours focusing on the project I found that the simple act of driving down the street had completely changed how I view the sights around me!  What types of things do you notice when you begin to create something??