Puny

I have unreasonable expectations, constructed on scaffolding I can hardly climb, and from up there I sometimes get vertigo. When I sit down to do art, I feel them creeping up : that I’m not doing more, or better work. That it’s not good enough. It’s so lame, this inner voice. So useless, yet there it is.

Tonight I insist on quashing this inner critic and cut squares at random from magazine with Bean on my lap. At my floor, a widening circumference of scraps. I am a messy artist. I wrap my hand over Bean’s smaller one and show him how to brush gel medium over the scraps I’ve assembled.

It’s not much, not pen and ink or watercolors or even really any work I generated myself. (See, there’s the voice. Where does it come from?) And yet I force myself to go with it tonight, making a mosaic of color. Pictures of spaces, dishes, fabric, dreams. For an instant I imagine there: in the restaurant with the red-backed chairs, or the windowed room with the pale green blown glass baubles hanging from the ceiling.

I try to let it be enough for a Tuesday, when my temples ache and the cat vomited on the kitchen table and the dishes are still in the sink.

Sigh.