Jaci Dawn

When I get to thinking too much, I plummet into the blues. Rainy days and blues.

I have been thinking too much.

I started out thinking about how I was going to pull together this website and put my artwork up, then I got out my colored pencils and started drawing. And drawing brings out the poet. And the poet looked around at her life which is not anywhere near what she had imagined it would be like at this stage in life.

She sighed. Then she looked back at the drawing she was working on and realized it was a self-portrait. A romanticized self portrait because when you draw, you can remove the moles and wrinkles, but a self-portrait nonetheless. And the self-portrait wanted to be colored in with earth colors: moss greens, autumn leaves, old-man’s-beard lichen, and sagebrush green. The self-portrait wanted to be free of the city, the traffic, the eight-to-five, and the responsibilities.

The self portrait longed to be where there are no boundaries and all the world is a yard and the paths are narrow on the side of the mountain.

The self-portrait didn’t want to know why things cannot be that way, not now, not in this season. She only longed to be free.

So I had to close the sketch book for a few days to silence the siren’s call.

I didn’t really close the sketch book, but it is tempting. It is so hard to not be the person I thought I would be by now, and to know that a lot of it was just life creeping up on me.

If you have watched the movie “Up!” you might know what I am talking about: there was this couple who planned to do all this traveling together, but life just took over. They kept breaking the penny jar to pay for things over the years until she died and he was left alone, haunted by all of her dreams, a bitter old man.

Of course, “Up!” has a happy ending: he decided to pursue her dream of flying around the world after all, and a silly adventure is started. One with talking dogs.

I do not want any talking dogs in my adventure, thank you very much. (SQUIRREL!!)

OK, I had to toss that in to lighten my mood. I know that I will get everything accomplished that I wanted to accomplish, it’s just going to be on a different time-table than I had it on when I was 19 and planning out my life.

I need to remind my self-portrait that even thought I can sketch out the moles and wrinkles, she is still 53 years old and there is still time to do everything. Breathe in, breathe out.

Meanwhile, it is still raining.