Holidays again

It's getting to be Holiday time again, and though this one promises to be different from any other so far (Wedding, anyone?), the same thoughts I always have have already started running through my work-weary brain. Nostalgia for holidays past with pets past running around Christmas Trees past, the residual memory of the smell of a particular dish that we'll never eat again, precisely, the wish that some family members were still with us and that some disagreements had never happened. All this is bundled together with the hope of good things to come, of new families evolving out of the old one, and with the hope that these holidays will be different, but will also be exactly the same as all the others.

These thoughts are all hitting me at a time when I actually do have a little free time on my hands and when I am beginning to feel old creative urges that I haven't indulged in at least a couple of years. It may be time to create again and to try to get myself back to a happy, productive energy that also allows me that creative outlet. I'm taking film home. I'm envisioning a collection of still lifes (lives?) taken around my house. Maybe also some scenic shots, but I want to do something a little more rigorously artistic. Whatever that means.

Writing is what I always wanted to do, but I worry about the influence of all this academia. Clearly, A.S. Byatt manages all right. I just need to find that balance (does it only come with rejecting, wholesale, the theories we're meant to internalize here?) and then find a story. And time and space in which to write.

Tomorrow it's the long trip home, flying in to Chicago with its serpentine suburban culs de sac, then proceeding South over the neatly parceled patchwork of rural Indiana. This time it will be in grey-greens, beiges, and browns, very different from the gold and green of the summer.

(written in the Barker Center; internal soundtrack: Joni Mitchell. You know the one.)