no doubt

my gal Winnie with her snowy snout and a few snowy, snowy scenes from the last few days

The world, our world, has turned black & white, monotone, a grey scale of brilliant white, nearly black steely grey and many shades of in-between. The harbour is still ice free, dark & deep, with a swaying slushy layer of cold on it's surface weighing down the waves. It's winter again and as winter's go this one so far is quiet, unassuming, here day in day out but without much drama. There's enough snow to ski and to build snow people but not too much, so far no mile high drifts or looming snow banks. No blizzards or storms or heavy snowfall warnings and best of all no frigid temperatures, no wind chill warnings if we bundle up well in our down and fleece walking around the streets of this little village twice daily is quite lovely - winter's here and it's - snowy.

By perseverance the snail reached the ark

Charles H. Spurgeon

I had one of those days yesterday. You know the ones where you pull the rug out from under yourself. With a whip, zip, zoom-suddenly you find yourself asking Hey ! where did my rug go ?

I sat at my desk in the afternoon pondering + wondering what am I doing? where is this going? is it going anywhere? this is hard? I'm not so used to hard, challenging ... can I do this? and on.
I allowed myself to wish for awhile, that I had become something else, chosen a different path, something more straight & forward instead of this winding, up hill, up hill, up hill, path I'm currently on - that of the self employed creative person. I felt discouraged, disheartened, down. Before retiring to the nest with my book and a bevy of furry beasts (the Prince & Sam were downstairs watching Saving Private Ryan in the new fabulous entertainment den by the fire) I checked my comments one last time, I had a comment from Famous (in my world anyway) illustrator Stephanie Levy telling me how much she liked my tight, contained, obsessively crowded, potentially way over done painting of a zillion trillion hearts & tiny leaves. Ahhhhhh ... my nagging brain relaxed a bit & said, maybe it's OK. Remember please, this is a process, keep on doing, keep on making ... and guess what girlfriend ? tomorrow is a brand new day - hooray !!

Rock Steady

No Doubt