Beauty, Found or Made

"If I were younger, I might be thinking/about something I heard at a party,/about an unusual car,// or the Press of Saturday night,/but as it is, I am simply conscious,/ an animal in pajamas," -from Billy Collins' Night Letter to the Reader

I realized that there is a whole blog scene of women, mothers even, who make things and blog about them. Recipes for faux sushi made with twinkies. Thrifted quilts from the sixties. Fabric dolls with flannelly experssive faces. There are even Flickr accounts of folks who document their home improvements. I can't believe that I am living in a time when you can follow the home improvements someone is making on a little flat in Amsterdam, or watch someone sew a pom-pom fringe of a guest room blanket in Odense!
Anyway, I was noticing how, in comparison, my blog is so introspective and maybe kind of myopic?! I don't know, I know I've seen really ranty blogs and I think, "Do you really need to be so angry about this? or It seems like you just wish they'd asked you to be on Frontline, I'm sorry but I don't really think you were in the running." Or I have seen other blogs and I don't want to sound braggy or showy. I've been doing this for a while now, and I have decided that what I want my blog to be is like from one of our family's favorite films "Running on Empty" (my favorite performance of River Phoenix) and River is trying to prepare his girlfriend (Martha Plimpton) for his mother's birthday dinner. He explains to her that there is no buying of gifts in their family, that all the gifts are found or made. Anyway, she finds this sea shell and makes a necklace out of it. I want this blog to be what their families gift-collection might be: a totally unexpected treasure from the woods or a collage made from wood chips on a styrofoam packing tray, a little bit of home-made redemption in the crazy struggle of life.

I admit I do this for me, to kind of summarize or bundle up a little moment and express it. Maybe to keep it alive. To share it with loved ones still in Boston or folks from college days, or even neighbors I see who wonder what goes on in my head. I want to be like the writer in Billy Collins' poem, a conscious animal in pajamas. I am not really a craftmama, although I am so taken with those blogs. I guess I am a writer, a little too encumbered right now to be in the publishing game, maybe a little afraid of the publishing, MFA game. But I still am a creature that needs to be putting out my stuff.

Photo was taken by Geoff at St. John the Divine in Mornigside Heights