Art!!

 SuperK is the painter in the family.  I'm the writer.  I'm using those two terms generously.  She isn't selling $10,000 paintings in trendy SoHo galleries and I'm not super busy with book signings at this point.  But both of us are trying to tickle our creative sweet tooth - this is a good example of crashing parts of two totally distinct idioms together and ending up with an incomprehensible phrase - and staying engaged with our creative sides.  I think it's important to exercise all parts of our being, and creating something new, all by yourself, whether or not it's worthy of a book signing or a gallery opening is not really the point.   We learn to take care of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual lives.  We learn to nurture all aspects of our being.            

There's a new guy at my meeting who's a professional photographer.  I mean "professional" as in he traveled and took pictures for magazine publications, photographed weddings, took portraits, and had showings at galleries.  Today, trudging the early road of sobriety, he has a job taking pictures of newborns and their parents at a local hospital.  He's content doing this.  It cannot help but be satisfying being around people who are experiencing such a joyous moment.  I suspect, however, that at some point this kind of work won't be as satisfying as it is today.  I'm not a photographer but it sounds repetitive and not very challenging.  

I'm not sure where I'm going with this.  Maybe just a personal reminder that I have to take care of my whole being.  I don't sit in front of The TV all the time.  I think the average American has The TV on six or seven hours a day.   I don't know how you do that.  I couldn't do that when I was drinking and was too drunk to get up off the couch.  When I compose a post on my blog I usually do some initial writing and then come back to the page later to review what I've written, and I almost always change some phrases around so they're more to my liking.  To me they sound better and I'm really writing for me.  I so much appreciate that you're reading this - it fills my heart up tick-full - but the pleasure is rereading my final draft and thinking: "Hey, that's good - that's what I was trying to say."

SuperK's work as a painter has helped me understand art in a much more significant way.  She tells me often that I have a pretty good eye with a camera.  I believe that because of our talks about perspective and composition and subject I can now see - sometimes, anyway - why a photograph I've taken catches my eye in a way that most of them don't.  Any photographs I take that look good can be chalked up to dumb luck but it's gratifying to understand more fully why a picture is pleasing or why it doesn't grab my attention,