It seems odd that ten days before Christmas I am looking out through an ever changing patterns of drops of rain. It is too warm for a comforting fire, too cool and wet for the pleasure of an evening walk. Yet, as I glance ahead toward the shortest day of the year, six days from now, I am comforted that the 5 o'clock gloaming is not sending me into the seasonal panic that traditionally besets me when daylight is minimal if not entirely obscured. I love and crave and indeed am energized by the sun. But today, despite its absence, I am finding a small and comforting light as I celebrate gratitude. This revelry has begun with observing the day, the landscape, the hours, through droplets - soft, quiet, syncopated sheets of H20 - Eau De Vie - water of life.
I pay attention to looking out and seeing the life around me in layers, both literally and figuratively. The art I make are meditations of this: veils of marks and lines, shapes and images.
I think that I began to see this way at a very young age. I can remember staring through rain drops running down the car window as a parent drove the family, or maybe just me, on a day such as this; dark, cold and drizzly. Yet there was a certain radiance in the country-side viewed through the layers of rain. Also, I recall sitting alone when there was nothing left to do but study the tracery of the runs of water as random dancing drops collected themselves and became tiny rivulets running down the window screen, staring from my childhood bedroom window.
These memories fuel my contemplations and allow me to choose to be grateful for the dark drizzly days of December. I consider the ways of nature, the earthen ground drinking the soaking water of life, the stillness of all flying things that lie sheltered somewhere in the unseen stratum around my house of screens and windows.
