+Time flies

One minute I was twelve, and the next I found myself decades older. I would guess many could posit their own numbers and relate to this sentiment. Before twelve, I would ask for a hall pass to go to the bathroom, and find myself in the chapel by myself. I’d run there through the hall, to make the most of my time as I knew I could be alone, and I’d wander through the woodwork inlays detailing the stations of the cross, then fixate on the stained glass windows, the mosaics, run my hand along the thickly lacquered pews, then off I’d go back to class.

To have that place to myself was to know sanctuary for the first time, and the further I got from that place, the more chaotic life was for me. I didn’t fit anywhere, amongst my peers, within my family, in every day life. But there I knew my place and it was liberating to be no one within it. I thought this is what it means to be a nun. That I could be alone in a sanctuary, forever, owing nothing to anything, and I wanted to stay a nun until I realized that’s not at all what it means.

After 12, I created sanctuary in every room, and there have been a great many since.

This morning it is overcast and raining, I paint on my table just inside the dimly lit eastern facing windows, listening to string compositions and toggling back and forth between the painting commission and this writing. It’s been several months since I’ve written here. All the former writings are caught in invisibility, they are irrelevant now, and so this chapter opens anew.

I once told Ruben and the late Isabel Toledo that artworking is just a cycle of fucking it up and fixing it, fucking it up and fixing it, fucking it up and fixing it, then walking away. We narrow the divide into the acceptable and reasonable until the work can be deemed as done. Sometimes it’s a tough sell for yourself to reach the final state. They understood this, though I doubt anyone had ever put it so crudely and unsophisticated as I had. I have my way, and there’s nothing elegant about it.

Sanctuary, created is not often offered in the form of a hall pass. Painting will suffice today.

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