Gratitude Latitude # 24

I am overflowing!!!




I am sitting here at my studio - a pastoral industrial studio at Hunters Point - Melody Gardot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Eb651s_o1Q&feature=related playing in the background. I am surrounded by my paintings that are pouring out of me every time I pick up a brush. I am even grateful that they are so different than anything else I have ever painted - they are in the abstract expressionist tradition (think JAckson Pollock with swirls and dashes instead of drips http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_expressionism) not that I am saying I am Jackson Pollack.

sweet gratitude for time with my little one. this weekend we made dehydrated apples (I cut them and she laid them on the trays) from our apple trees out front (she picked the apples with Nana). Raine and I also made some zucchini pancakes (I did the slicing and measuring and she did the mixing).

Last week I brought her with me to my studio and had the first quality studio day with her I have been hoping for so long to have. Where I am painting and she is painting and we are both lost in that space - every once in a while talking or interacting. It was awesome. At a certain point I looked up and saw her watching me and she said "I like your painting papa". I almost started crying. It was so sweet.

There is some sweet sorrow in this hunters point studio now - knowing I will be leaving it. Knowing it was a great place of healing for me and a place of quiet reflection. I know for most of my community it will not have existed as few have seen it. It reminds me of a place I was stranded in the Saudi Arabian desert - a place where I found so much of myself and that no one has seen but me.

I am grateful that after years of checking on and off over the internet for an old army buddy I was in desert storm with - I finally found him. Turns out his wife bugged him to try facebook and he was just about to dump it thinking it was a waste of time. he is the guy who i spent the most time with over there and who kept me sane if that is what you could call it :) He has a little one about Raine's age - tonight he is heading out on a night drive from Denver (he is a trucker) and is going to give me a ring from the road.

For my wonderful mother in law - who at 70 faces change with courage and love for family and with curiosity, hope and pride for her kids.

For a wife who even after 14 years of marriage still delights my heart, still makes me see how much stronger a person can get each year, keeps me keep seeking a better version of myself to somehow match the love she has for me.

I am grateful for some new fun tunes:

Thank you for making simple troubles beautiful and important ladies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZKFoMq3GaA&feature=channel

Look at this young fellow - I am reminded of someone singing an old spiritual - he seems carried far away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvrHfiRq8wg&feature=related

For picking up something old and making it new - a banjo, old cool, old sexy, a fiddle, a carnival, and yes tattooed ladies, places on the road in songs seeming more familiar than they should
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SUFfQ3tGhk&feature=related

One more - 'cuz we need to pick it up for our friends- need to share the load - and we need to like it and feel like "i got it buddy - put the load right on me - i got it baby" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXf-SuBbJa0&feature=related


Grateful for rainstorms, grateful for fresh organic grapes, fresh water, that feeling you get when you know you are moving somewhere new and you have the window open and you feel free and you breath deep like your lungs could take in your whole life of possibilities, like you're young and unafraid and filled with - I dare ya!

Peace and Good Things,

Andrei

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. - Albert Einstein